Hi. This is Paul D'Alizzuri. Welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could subscribe and do a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much.

Today, I am thrilled, I mean, like, really thrilled to introduce you to Irene Harry. And our topic is animal free dairy, making cheese without cows. Irina is the CMO at Change Foods, a precision fermentation food tech company that creates animal free dairy products. Prior to joining Change Foods, Irina worked at 2 of the largest plant based food and beverage brands, Silk and So Delicious. Irina holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and we connected on LinkedIn. And I reached out to Irina and Irina. Thank you so much for saying yes and being on the show today.

Oh, thank you for having me.

You've got quite a resume there. So I really encourage people to go check out what Irina has been doing for a really long time. And we're gonna get into this whole space of innovation in the food world and what that has to do with climate change. But before we do that, Irene, if somebody's listening and said, well, who is this person? And give me a little bit of sense of their backstory. Like, what would a listener who doesn't know you want to know about you and your journey, both as a human and as an impact business leader?

How much time do we have? Oh, I know. 33

hours. I

don't know. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, so on on the professional side, as you mentioned, I'm a chief marketing officer at Change Foods, which is a precision fermentation. It's a food tech company. It's kind of a new world of food where we're combining traditional food making and the latest advances in tech. And before that, I was in more of a traditional food space. So I worked on Silk So Delicious.

Those are brands you can find in a grocery store and, you know, worked on a lot of innovation within that space, within plan based, and loved it. By way of background, I also have, you know, worked on at P&G on a brand like Gillette, worked at Deloitte Consulting. So I kinda have a, what you would say, a classic training. But then I decided that I I really was excited by the idea of entrepreneurship because it does give you so much more freedom, so much more ability to go and do things quickly, to try something, to kinda pave your own path. And so, you know, I took a jump into entrepreneurship and really loved it. It's, you know, been been kind of a entrepreneur for over 3 years now, and I'm having so much fun.

From from a corporate journey to serial entrepreneurship, we might call it, in the specifics of fermentation, this new tech that's coming. One of the things that you were saying before we hit record, I mean, is like, it's not just food, you know, innovation for its own sake, or like veganism for veganism sake, but there's a real depth to what you're doing. And and one of those motivations is around climate and around what's going on in the world and how some of the innovations that are being built in the food space are trying to make the world a better place at a time like we're getting some concerning news. Talk to us about that part of the why of how you're doing what you're doing.

It is all about the why for me. It's not about the what. I'm a mother. I have 2 children. And I remember for a very long time, I was kind of on this health, wellness. You know, when you're raising kids, you start thinking about food and what they're eating because it's so important. Right? And I already kind of was on this, you know, per predominantly whole food plant based train. Like, if you read any sort of nutrition science, you realize that plants are amazing and and great for you.

Right? So I was already there for a long time, but then I think it was 4 or 5 years ago. I don't know if you remember. We had these massive wildfires. I lived in Colorado at the time, and it was just, you know, a whole place.

I live in New Mexico, so we were breathing that smoke Oh,